Ideally for my home network, I'd like a central HDD that keeps ALL our music, photos and movies etc on it - and we (my wife and I) can access the content over our established wireless network. That way I can stream or copy files from the central HDD to devices such as our MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, PS3 and iPhone. We already have AirFoil purchased - so we have the software, but can you purchase an external HDD that connects to the network, or do I need a dedicated computer (server?) for this purpose?

yeh should just be able to buy a hard drive enclosure with ethernet and plug into the router and go, i'm using sharedlink dns 320 on mac/pc from same network and its ok, not the fastest, should have buy something better than that.i didn't use airfoil

it's a free BSD server platform that does everything you could possibly need. Use an old $50 PC, put a gigabit ethernet card in it, boot it off a USB stick and add as many HDDs as you like. tres easy, there's heaps of walkthrough setup instructions floating around on the 'net too.

ideally you will want something that is super easy to use. freenas might be easy for some but not for others. go for a NAS that is a complete package like the synology diskstations or a Drobo mate. the software is dead simple and it will do everything you want. you can get them preloaded with drives and they have gigabit ethernet ports.

the purpose of a nas ultimately is to store your stuff, but the feature i would say is more important is the capacity to keep your stuff stored in the event of a catastrophic hard drive failure. so go for a 4 or 5 bay and have it configured to use 1 drive (or thereabouts) for redundancy (i have a 4 with 2tb drives which gives me 5.3tb). so if one hard drive dies you can just swap it out. lots of people go for the more space option and stripe their data across all the drives, but if one dies then you lose it all.

i have one of these loaded with drives it shouldnt cost you more than $700 and that will last you ages.

i love drobo stuff. freenas is pretty capable but be prepared for a lot of pointless fucking around. drobo ain't the cheapest but it just works out of the box, and once you install some apps you can get music streaming, stream movies to your ps3/360, etc, etc. i'd definitely recommend it.

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